Needing some 80’s vibes for your day? Why don’t you “float around” in this new stunner from Houston/Nashville’s pop duo Ansible (Josiah Hall and Cody Smith). The guys did it right again, taking us back in time with a dance track that evaluates communication and relationships while simultaneously reminding us that everything that’s meant to happen will.
Check out our exclusive stream of the track below, then read about the inspiration behind it all in our brief interview with the guys.
“Rest Of Our Lives” is a bit of a departure from some of your other music. What made you move in this direction with it?
Cody: Assuming we’ve not gotten confused with the Austin metal band The Ansible—I guess we all just loved Ender’s Game enough to name our bands after it—I had this sort of security-blanket relationship with the music of the 80s. It was the music of my parents’ early adulthood and my childhood, having come up in a rural town that was five years behind on all cultural waves. It was almost like a kind of therapy to make.
Josiah: I’ve always had a baritone vocal, and have never felt particularly comfortable using it. In a lot of music, I feel like talent is associated with range, especially in a higher register. The 80’s was rife with baritone vocalists. “Rest of Our Lives”, while not featuring my lowest register, is a step in that direction.
How did you approach this song? Was it instrumentals first, lyrics, a melody?
C: I wrote the song probably four months or more before I had ever shown Josey any of what would later become the Ansible record. I had just moved into this tiny apartment with no close friends in a new town, so I wrote and recorded all these songs to send to my mom and dad in emails with subject lines like, “Hey, which John Hughes movie is this in?”
J: The music was written before anything else. I had a lot of trouble with the vocals and lyrics at first. I played around with a bunch of stuff, and nothing seemed to take. Unrelated in the moment, I half jokingly sang, “No I’m not happy with my message.” in response to a voicemail I was leaving someone. That became a lyric in the first verse, and the song wrote itself after that.
Any fun anecdotes from the recording process?
C: So this is the first song Josey and I worked on together. Like he said, he struggled with writing his parts—I only found that out later. On my end, all I ever heard was, “Going to track something tonight.” Then I got a dropbox invite. On my end, though, the struggle was figuring out what to do with what he sent. The vocal ended up sounding kind of lo-fi when compared to the other songs. In the context of 80s records, albums could sound different from song to song. For me, that was good to know, because as I later found out, all of my struggle was borne out of a bunch of background noise due to Josey forgetting to turn his ceiling fan off while tracking. Needless to say, we’ve since refined our process.
What do you think of when you hear this song? Alternatively, how do you hope people feel when they listen to “Rest Of Our Lives”?
J: For me, it’s the idea that the things we create will “float around for the rest of our lives”. The art we made 5 years ago, influenced by whatever positive or negative in our life, will exist, and can still stir emotion in someone else.
C: Pretty much the same for me. I just think of the hopefulness, or hopelessness, of speaking into the void sometimes. I hope people feel the former more than the latter, though!
What are your New Years Resolutions?
J: Shed some crutches/vices.
C: One million more resolutions… that’s how it works, right?
Anything you’d like to add?
C: Thanks, and hope everyone knocks it out of the park this year!
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Keep up with Ansible here.
